User blog:The Dragon Demands/Conjectural language tree
I've been toying around with a conjectural language tree: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Factors that need to be considered for Low Valyrian are: 1 - We have no idea just how much Rhoynish influenced them. The Rhoynar were sort of like the Greeks to the Valyrian's Romans: they were already flourishing six thousand years ago. The Rhoynar are the ones who taught the Andals how to forge iron. I suspect that it had greater influence in the northern Free Cities, which are along the rivers. 2 - Volantis, Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh are all fairly similar due to being politically unified for so long - first by Volantis, then under the "Kingdom of the Tree Daughters". 3 - Tyrion can speak Braavosi, but can't speak Pentoshi -- which indicates that they actually aren't very similar. 4 - The assumption here is that "Braavosi" is the odd duck of the languages; Braavos was founded by an extremely diverse group of slaves fleeing from Valyria, and as a result, it should be the most divergent from High Valyrian. When Samwell Tarly, who speaks reasonably good High Valyrian, hears a Braavosi speaking, he says he can only make out every other word. 5 - Note that I included two, now extinct, intermediary stages of "Vulgate" Valyrian. In real life, Latin didn't just turn into French overnight...or even into Old French overnight. There were intermediary stages such as "Medieval Latin" as distinct from "Classical Latin". This has led to another problem, though: the question of "Vulgate Latin" that existed simultaneously with Classical or Medieval. The idea is that only the ruling elites spoke "Classical Latin" very well, but the commoners spoke a debased version of this even at the same time. Thus when "Classical" shifted into "Medieval", it was borrowing more from things that the "Vulgate" was already doing. The other reason that I included a "hypothetical Vulgate Valyrian" stage is as a convenient excuse for linguistic oddities. You see the "Volantene" that Talisa was speaking in "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" was just made up without consulting the staff linguist. Things like that get waved off as a "Volantene Low Valyrian oddity" but what if it doesn't fit the later pattern of what "Volantene" should be? So the cheat is to invent an intermediary stage - history has blind alleys. So if there's ever an oddity that does not exist in High Valyrian OR Volantene Low Valyrian, we can easily handwave it away by saying "oh, that's a development which started in "Old Volantene" after it split from High Valyrian, but which was ultimately abandoned in "modern Volantene Low Valyrian". Just meddling around, though these are probably unrelated, I came up with a mock-representation of a Maester of the Citadel's attempt to reconstruct a lost "mother-tongue". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concerns involved with this: 1 - The concept that the Andalish language, aka "Common Tongue", stayed exactly the same for six thousand years pushes the limits of credibility. Other languages like the Old Tongue must have influenced it to at least some degree. 2 - The Rhoynar influenced the Andals in Andalos, teaching them how to forge iron. 3 - The language of Qarth is purely conjectural. Something like that it isn't pronounced remotely the same but has some structural similarities so no one is sure. 4 - The Maesters have a massive debate over where to place Lhazareen: is it closer to Old Ghiscari or Dothraki? It is part of the same sprachbund region so obviously there has been influence, but do they descend from a common ancestor? 5 - "Tolorran" is the language of the lost civilization at what the Dothraki call Vaes Tolorro in the Red Wastes. The language is extinct, and only known through references in the ancient texts of the Ghiscari Empire, made when it was still young. So it's a dead language known only through the writings of another dead (but better known) language. What little evidence there is of "Tolorran" proved very controversial, threatening to challenge the entire pre-existing schemes of how Proto-Andalo-Essosi developed ("Tolorran" is analogous to Tocharian or Hittite - dead language which offers insights into how PIE actually developed). Category:Blog posts